


one of these days, won't be long

by jouissant



Category: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Genre: Bittersweet, Complicated Relationships, Drinking, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 08:58:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7634026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Timlin and Davis," says Llewyn. "Still think it could've been Davis and Timlin." </p><p>"You're an asshole." </p><p>"It's alphabetical, Mike. And I'm not just an asshole. I'm an asshole with a record out."</p>
            </blockquote>





	one of these days, won't be long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



Mike beats Llewyn to the first box like a kid on Christmas and goes at the taped breadth with his bare hands, too het up to bother with scissors. Inside the records are packed tight as sardines in oily shrinkwrap and he pries one free, slips it out of its allotted centimeter with an immense and slippery satisfaction. 

"Holy shit," Mike says. He smacks Llewyn on the arm. "Would you look at that." 

"Timlin and Davis," says Llewyn. "Still think it could've been Davis and Timlin." 

"You're an asshole." 

"It's alphabetical, Mike. And I'm not just an asshole. I'm an asshole with a record out." 

Mike leans clumsily over the box of records and into Llewyn's personal space. His breath is sweet with whiskey, but then so is Mike's. "What a coincidence," he says. "So am I." Llewyn's mouth opens; there's an intake of air, the suggestion of speech. Mike can feel Llewyn's question in the air like the weight preceding a thunderstorm. Yeah, Mike thinks. He wants to stay in, he wants another drink, he wants—

"You wanna—" he starts, just as Llewyn says, decisively: "We're going to the Gaslight tonight." 

"Oh. Yeah, sure." Mike frowns, sits back and finds his glass on the coffee table. The whiskey's bad; they finished off the decent bottle, a gift from the Gorfeins, whose accompanying card had declared the record "the first of many." 

"Why, what did you want to do?" 

"Nothing," Mike says, frowning.

"Good," says Llewyn. "I'm taking one of these," he says, holding up a record, the two of them grinning from beneath the plastic, Timlin and Davis happier than Mike or Llewyn have probably ever been. "I want to see the look on Jim's face." 

"You want dinner?" Mike asks. If they're going, he thinks, he wants to go. 

"Nah," Llewyn says. He scoots his own glass towards Mike, little jabs with his index finger. "Fill 'er up, huh, Timlin?"

Don't call me that, Mike wants to say. Already the man on the record feels like a doppelganger, and Mike knows what it means to see one of those. He takes up the bottle and lets the whiskey glug into Llewyn's glass.

"Bring your guitar," Llewyn says when they get up to leave.

Outside it's beginning to rain. Llewyn tucks the record under his arm, Mike turns his collar up. They walk in silence, guitar cases thumping against their legs. Mike can feel Llewyn vibrating beside him, and he thinks it's a kind of spark he hasn't felt from Llewyn in a long time, probably not since they made the record. Maybe if he went back home, put it on and listened hard he could soak up a little of whatever residual magic Llewyn seems to have found. 

Walking through the Village in the gloaming he can feel his own good mood begin to ebb away, the way he often does at night. It's all right in company, he thinks, it's all right with a lamp on, with a friend. He wonders if Llewyn's outgrown his usefulness as a ward, grown too familiar, too well-worn a constant. Mike moves around Llewyn these days in a lumbering way, logs colliding in water. He wakes up feeling low and shuffles into the dingy kitchen, finds Llewyn with a cigarette pressed to a sliver of open window and nods his good mornings, and more often than not the day grinds painfully on from there like a gristmill. 

The Gaslight is a cave, and ducking inside he feels a little better, safer, the way an animal does in the cold. Jim and Jean have a table; Jean has a cigarette dangling between her slim fingers and Jim is whispering something in her ear. She finds Mike's eyes like she's been watching for him and screws up her face, sticking her tongue out like a kid, and there, he thinks, that's better too. Llewyn veers off towards the bar, muttering something about round two, though it's more like four or five if you're counting. Mike ignores him. He slips through the crowd like a submarine, making for the table. 

"Hey," says Jean, and then she gives a little huff of shock at the way Mike's pulled her half to her feet, wrapped her birdlike frame in a hug. He shoves his nose into her hair; she smells like Prell shampoo and tobacco smoke, and he unexpectedly finds his throat closing, tears pricking at his eyes. 

"Mike?" she asks. "What's wrong?" 

"Nothing," he says. He pulls away, kicks an empty chair back so he can sit. "The records came in today," he says. "But pretend to be surprised when Llewyn shows you. He's been looking forward to twisting the knife." 

She rolls her eyes and fastens her lips around the end of her smoke. "What a child," she says through the exhale, and Jim laughs in that daddish way he has, like he's got everyone figured out twice over. Mike's no fool; he knows that Llewyn wants to crow about the record because he can't crow about fucking Jean, but truth be told he wouldn't be overly surprised to hear Jim's figured that out too somewhere along the way. He'd probably set his hand on Llewyn's shoulder and tell him he understood, send Llewyn apoplectic. 

The man himself trots up a minute later, clutching a trio of beer bottles by the necks. He sets two of them down in front of Mike and Jean, shrugs at Jim. "Shit, sorry," he says. "Didn't see you there." 

"Not to worry," Jim says. "I think I'm going to give it up, anyway. Inflames the vocal cords, you know?" He strokes his throat. Jean hums interestedly, and Llewyn looks as though he wants to flip the table over. 

Llewyn elbows Mike. "You tell 'em the news?" 

Jean beams at them clownishly. "Oh my God, Llewyn, are you pregnant?" 

"Fuck off, Jean." 

"Jim, did you hear that? Llewyn and Mike are having a baby." 

"I said, fuck off," says Llewyn. 

"Don't drag me into this," Mike says. "And no, I didn't tell them." 

He sucks on his beer. He's tired; he wants to get this dinner theatre bullshit over with, get out of here and get back home. _With Llewyn_ , his brain supplies by rote, though even as he thinks the words they seem to drag at his bones, muddy and sluggish. Next to him, Llewyn presents the record; Jim and Jean seem to forget the prickling tension of a moment ago to ooh and ah. Jean takes the record from Llewyn as carefully as if it really is a baby, and runs her fingers over the cover, over both their smiling faces. When she looks up at them her eyes are wide. Mike thinks there's a certain brightness to them, but he can't be sure. The light in the club has always been eponymously dim. 

"You've got to play," she says. "Jim, don't they have to play?" 

"Of course you've got to play." 

"We couldn't," Mike says. "We're not on the bill." 

"Llewyn can go talk to Pappi," Jim says. "Can't you?" 

Llewyn wants to. Mike can see it in the set of his body, the way he's tapping time with his leg beneath the table. "Might've said something to him over at the bar," he says. He lets his knee fall against Mike's, just for a moment. "How about it?" 

Mike thinks about Llewyn's face in the apartment earlier; he thinks about his face in the studio the day they recorded, big boom mike hanging before his lips, how white his teeth had looked in the darkened room when he opened his mouth up to sing. 

"Yeah," Mike says. "Okay." And when they're up on stage, room gloomy but for the footlights, he does feel okay, feels as if they might be Timlin and Davis after all. He can feel the crowd in the velvety dark, hears them shift and rustle, and then when the two of them begin to play he hears them fall silent, and he thinks he'd rather hear that lacuna, that rapt but temporary silence, than anything at all.

***

Llewyn's plastered drunk when they leave the Gaslight. They both are, Mike maybe a hairbreadth less, good for hailing a cab, piling both their lax bodies inside. He's still feeling flush from his half of the advance, and anyway he doesn't want to walk, doesn't want to risk losing Llewyn to some late night diversion. 

"I'm fucking happy," Llewyn says as the cab jogs up Houston. "Timlin, you hear that? Hey." He kicks at Mike across the backseat, and the driver glances wearily into the rearview mirror. 

"He pukes back there, you're on the hook for cleaning," he says. 

"Yeah, I got it," says Mike. 

"What'd he say?" asks Llewyn. 

"Nothing." 

"Fuck off, what'd he say?" 

"He thinks you're gonna puke in his cab," says Mike. He starts to giggle, sound bubbling up out of him like champagne. Suddenly Llewyn losing his lunch in a cab is the funniest thing he's ever heard of. 

"Puke in his cab. I'm not gonna puke in his fucking cab." 

"Easy," Mike says, flinging his arm across Llewyn's chest. He means to whack him and then move off, but his hand ends up in Llewyn's lap instead. Llewyn squirms, glaring at Mike's arm like his puking in the cab was its own personal suggestion. 

"I'm not fucking drunk," Llewyn says. 

"Sure you ain't," says the cabbie. 

"I said I'm not fucking drunk, and I'm not gonna—" He stops, biting off the rest of the sentence. Mike looks at him. He's greenish-white behind the beard, and sweat's coming up at his temples. 

"Aw, Christ," Mike says. "Pull over." 

"Huh?" 

"Pull over or he really will puke in your fucking cab." 

The cabbie hangs a quick left onto a side street, and no sooner has he glided to the curb than Llewyn flings his door open and pours himself out onto the asphalt. From the open door comes the unmistakeable sound of retching. 

"Jesus," Mike mutters to himself. The cabbie glowers in disapproval at the whole sorry state of affairs. 

"Oughta charge extra for the goddamn language," he says, and Mike rolls his eyes but he doesn't bother to argue. He just pays their fare and exits the cab, dragging their guitar cases with him. He crosses behind the cab into the road in the retreating cherry glow of the taillights. Llewyn's on his hands and knees, a spreading puddle of liquid beneath him on the street. He groans and flails as Mike helps him up, spitting into the puddle and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips glisten, and Mike reaches out and swipes at the mess on his beard with the sleeve of his jacket. It's foul, but tonight Mike doesn't care. 

They're not far from home, and Mike reasons a walk in the open air won't hurt, especially if Llewyn hasn't cleaned himself out yet. "C'mon," Mike says, and starts down the sidewalk. He shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't look back, and it's only the soft thwack of Llewyn's gum-soled boots on the sidewalk that tell him he's following along behind. 

They make a couple of blocks in silence before Llewyn feels the need to chip in again. "I meant it, you know," he calls up to Mike. 

Mike jerks his head back. "Meant what?" 

He's smiling already, but he wishes he had the self control not to let on. He never does, though; he's as bad as Llewyn with Jim and Jean, but instead of petty meannesses lobbed like spitballs it's the fact he's always been a goddamn sucker for Llewyn's erstwhile romanticism, can never ignore the moments Llewyn charms him, the moments they get the timing right. 

"That I'm happy." 

Mike shakes his head. He slows, then stops. He doesn't look back at Llewyn again, just stands and waits for him to catch up. He watches his own reflection in a shop window opposite; it's a children's store, the window gay with toys and clothes. On a shelf lies a familiar shape: a bright blue kid-sized ukelele, color muted to navy in the ambient glare of the streetlight. The price tag hangs from a thread looped through one of the strings on the fretboard, and it flutters beneath the instrument like a white moth. 

When Mike was young his father brought him to a store just like this on his birthday and told him to pick out anything he wanted. There'd been a guitar about this size, and a book of sheet music, and Mike had hated that fucking guitar for as long as it took to pick out "Twinkle, Twinkle" with throbbing fingers. Before the window now he swings his case through the night air like a pendulum, whacks the edge of it against his knee. It smarts, and the case is hefty. Couple more times right on the bone and he'll bruise. 

A pigeon lights up from somewhere, shocking and chiropteran as birds always are at night. Soft step beside him and Llewyn's caught up, colliding with Mike on the empty street. He folds Mike up in his arms and brushes his lips against Mike's ear. Mike twitches, thinking of the nauseating aftermath of the cab. 

"Nobody's around," Llewyn says, mistaking Mike's distaste for caution. "What're you looking at, anyway?" 

In the window their conjoined reflection lurches.

"Nothing," says Mike. "Let's go home."


End file.
